Diamond Dick

About the Play

The first in the Tulsa series. A timeline account of the riots of ’21, reporting long repressed, detailing the false arrest of Dick Rowland, an African American shoe-shiner accused of sexually accosting Sarah Paige in an elevator, and the subsequent riots. A vast tract of Tulsa, called Black Wall Street (a prosperous middle class neighborhood), was burned to the ground, and as many as 300 African Americans were killed. A touchstone of the story in the play: the burning of the Dreamland Theater. The play unfolds chronologically over the days of the riots; documentary accounts merge with dreamlike readings.